I think you managed to give a very good example of why people get unfriended....Really, dribble like that is why I don't have my 16 year old cousin friended.
I find Facebook good for two things: Catching wind of social events that the group of younger people I hang around with organize. (I went back to grad school a lot later than those kids who just pushed on through. They grew up a facebook generation, I did not.) The other is keeping in touch with my relatives that all live 1000 miles away. If you're getting spammed with stupid crap, you have two very easy options: Unfriend them or block their status updates. It's really not hard. Nobody needs 400+ friends. Pick a close few, and viola, 95% of the crap is gone.
For browsing on my tiny netbook I went with Tab Style Tree for Firefox - it lets you put all the tabs on the left, freeing up a few more lines of vertical space. Killed the bookmark bar, merged the address bar, minimised icons...I got about 3-4 more lines of space out of the browser by default. Now, I can get more with F11, but I lose all the tabs.
That was my adaptation strategy. I do agree with the article that the lack of vertical space on laptops is becoming a serious problem.
Nope. I'm assuming an ISP that is seeing its available bandwidth crippled by shittons of spam and worm activity. If you look at the numbers, spam is ridiculous compared to normal email volumes. Botnets are creating minor DDOS attacks just trying to spread.
I'm assuming botnets are a serious problem at the ISP level, and that they'd want to do something about it. This is from a technical standpoint, not from a sleazy-ass marketing standpoint. Does that viewpoint exist? Sure as hell does. Do the techs in the back room have a serious problem on their hands? Yes they do. The question is if it's serious enough to get attention from the tech side without drawing attention from the sleaze-bag side.
I still think there is a flaw in that logic. Botnets have to do two things:
1) Spread. This would take care of worms. Users aren't about to be scanning ports on hundreds of different machines over short time periods. Worms are. If you cut off machines trying to spread worms, you cut down on the problem significantly. This isn't behavior that most users engage in. It's very much worm-specific.
2) Do their job. If you're cutting off infected machines, there are less available to do their job. This means you can't necessarily spread the load out to other machines.
You're never totally going to get rid of botnets, but if you reduce their spread, and force them to really try to hide in normal traffic, we'll be in a much better place.
I don't trust ISPs much at all. But I think there's a drastic overreaction here about what's being suggested. Bot traffic doesn't look like normal traffic. If it did, we'd have orders of magnitude less spam in the world.
Oh, Joe Luser is sending 10,000 emails an hour. It might be a false alarm!!!!!
Look - botnets aren't some sneaky, low network usage sort of thing. If they were, it wouldn't be an issue. By and large, botnets send out massive amounts of data. They are what produce the spam which floods the internet. They are what create the DDOS attacks on various sites. We're not talking about some user who suddenly has a spike in download activity. We're talking about saturating a connection for hours on end. We're talking about mass emails. We're talking about pings and network requests multiple times a second for hours.
Botnet activity isn't something that's hard to spot. If it's hard to spot, it's not an issue for the ISP. I think you're completely ignoring why botnets are a problem in the first place with your paranoid post of some alternate universe.
Nobody is going to have a 'false alarm'. Botnets are not in any way close to normal traffic. If they are, then the ISP doesn't have a problem with that amount of traffic, and the internet isn't choked with spam. And if you're somehow creating traffic close to what a botnet does, you're a problem as well.
Yeah. The only AV that I've seen that's anywhere as bad as Norton is CA. I still can't get that off my GF's computer. I've spent 3 hours already. Norton Corporate is awesome. Nobody should have to deal with Norton Home. Ever. It's cruel and unusual punishment.
The Harmony remotes kick all sorts of ass. Got one for my dad a few years ago. Now he has one remote which does TV, Cable, Home Theater, VCR/DVD, etc. They take a bit of time to program, (CD with USB cable, look up device codes on the internet, etc.) but once set up, they are amazing. They even have troubleshooting built in. If something doesn't turn on/off, or your tuner/TV isn't on the right channel, the remote figures it out with a bit of user-input. I'd rather have hard buttons to press, but for technophobes like my dad, it's awesome.
I think the real reason may be able to be explained by a probability distribution, rather than a conspiracy. Phone companies have very, very few ways to credit your account. Definitely no automated credits. They have many, many automated ways to charge your account. Interest, late payment fees, over the limit for minutes/data/texts, out-of-network calling, roaming charges, etc.
Throw all the charges into a bucket with all the credits, and you're already very heavily weighted to charges when picking randomly. Take out everything that's not automated, and you're left with just about all charges. Not to say that they aren't sleazy as hell, but I think automated errors heavily favor charges due to the shear number of them.
Hey, maybe he lives in the middle of Montana, and drives to other states on the weekend for fun....
For the record, I-90 between Albany and Buffalo is one of the roads which I see in my nightmares. Too many long drives on that depressing stretch of nothing. Worst drive ever was from Ohio to Springfield, MA on 90. That drive never seemed to end. But yeah, parent had no idea what the hell he was talking about. 400-500 miles of driving, 6-8 hours depending on route and destination. That's not quite "relatively near"...
Do you want to know why? Dig up your state standards for education. Read through, and be amazed. Most of it is vague bullshit. Occasionally, we ask kids to memorize a bunch of facts, then spit them out on a bubble sheet. That's the federal mandate of NCLB. Education has been heading this way for decades now. We just formalized the decision that "knowledge = memorizing" in the last decade. Because memorizing is hard, we skim the surface of a bunch of stuff, and never teach kids how or why. Just what. It's really depressing. Here's a Math, Science, and Technology standard from New York:
MST-7-E: Realize ideas-Constructing components or models, arriving at a solution, and evaluating the result
I don't know about you, but I'm glad that we've set that standard for graduating seniors. It will take them far!
Yet another example of how the editing of this website is solely focused on adviews, and nothing else. I'm looking for a new website, as are quite a few others. Any ideas?
Another user today posted what he claimed was his last post here, as he dumped/. forever due to shit like this. I'm pretty close as well. Anyone want to recommend another site that does science and tech, but has actual, non sleazeball, functional editors?
I've been feeling the same way for a long time now. However, I don't see that Reddit is any better. I skimmed the science section there and it's a mess of random cruft.
Where do we go to get useful science and technology news, edited appropriately, with a comment system that doesn't completely suck?
Slashdot would be fantastic if we could get some editors. However, the lack of any sort of useful work in that area is pretty close to driving me away even without an alternative. I blocked kdwason, which helped. But blocking absolute, mind-blowing suck doesn't help make the rest not suck.
French? Really? I grew up within spitting distance of Quebec, and the first thing I thought of when I heard 'Libre' was 'Lucha Libre'. I'm pretty sure that the Spanish-exposed US is a bigger portion than the French exposed. Although perhaps smaller than the 'Nacho Libre' exposed, although the brain injuries from that may make that a moot point.
Yeah, "wire tapping" laws need a 21st century re-do. A CCD soldered to a microprocessor soldered to a solid state drive, all soldered to a battery would be pretty damn hard to qualify under any sort of "wire tapping", for the most general definition of 'wire'. (Yes, I know that 'wire' in this context means "phone line or other communications line". Still...)
Sadly, they're pretty damn common. The job is self-selecting. You generally need to be a cocky, power hungry bastard to want to be a cop. There aren't a lot of white knights becoming cops. Plus, it's pretty well documented that people get excused from being cops for I.Q. test scores that are too high. If you want to be scarred for life, here are a blogger couple who document as many of these morons as they can. They're pretty hardcore libertarian/anti-government, but they do link to all primary sources in the way of local newspapers. Unknown News: Cops you won't see on COPS.
First, the lifespans of CFL are based on on/off cycles, not time on. I haven't seen anyone who's in any way informed claim that CFL are good for places like bathrooms. In fact, other than a refrigerator, I can't think of many places where it would be worse to use a CFL. If you're putting a CLF into a bathroom, (or a refrigerator) you're using it in the worst way possible. Yes, it will suck for that. Those are places where we should be using incandescents. Use CFLs properly, and they last a damn long time.
Secondly, the quality of CFL varies a ton. I have one that does what you noted - a long period of dim, sickly light, then a brilliant dazzle. I have another that's nearly indistinguishable from an incandescent. The only difference is that it turns on at like (an equivalent) 90 watts instead of 100, and a quarter of the time I think to myself, "isn't that usually a little brighter...?" The rest of the time, I don't notice. After a couple minutes, it hits the full 100+ watt equivalent. It's bright and warm too. It's also been the primary bulb in my living room for 3+ years now. It gets turned on when it's getting dark, and stays on until I go to bed. That's how you use a CFL. And in that case, it doesn't matter that it's a tiny bit dim when it first comes on. If you need instant, 100% intensity light, you should be using an incandescent in that application.
Lastly, would you all stop panicking about mercury? It's fucking obnoxious. The WHO sets a limit for mercury exposure at 5x10^-4 grams per day. A CFL has about 4-5 grams of mercury in it. Yes, if you punch a hole in a CFL and inhale all the mercury out of it, it will be bad. But when you break one, the mercury vaporizes. What's the volume of the room you break it in, compared to the volume of the CFL? If you're in a room that's substantially larger than the inside of the CFL, (hint: you are!) the mercury quickly disperses in it. Ventilate, and you'll be fine. In fact, even if you don't, you should be fine, unless you break a bulb every couple of weeks inside. And each bulb has on the same order of magnitude of mercury that each adult has in their mouth in the way of fillings.
Use a quality CFL properly, and you're saving money, saving energy, and it's pretty much indistinguishable from an incandescent. Like anything, go cheap and use it improperly, and it doesn't do a good job. I agree with you about LED lighting - a few more years, and I think it will start to be competitive. Just leave off the mercury poisoning crap please. Unless you're huffing CFLs, they're perfectly safe.
Frustrating, isn't it? My favorite are just straight IP addresses which require permission to run scripts. With all the botnets in the world using home computers, I'm not even going to bother to look up who it belongs to. That's just sketchy as all hell.
If you're a legitimate website, there's no reason you need to have 5-10 other domains running scripts on your page, including just random IP addresses.
For those of us who use things like NoScript, the price can be that we don't get there. Ever.
I know that when I go to a site that can't work unless I allow a half dozen or more other sites to run scripts, I sometimes decide that it's not worth my time. When I click a link that then has to contact several domains, (sometimes ones I have specifically blocked) I might stop right there and close the tab.
The web isn't just headed towards redirect hell - it's turning into a damn sketchy web of tentacles working their way into every page. When I find ones that I'm not comfortable having around, I don't go back.
I'm not sure I like what the web has become. Thanks to NoScript, I at least know what it's become.
Slashdot Mirror
teh suck
(LOL@rodent)
I think you managed to give a very good example of why people get unfriended....Really, dribble like that is why I don't have my 16 year old cousin friended.
I find Facebook good for two things: Catching wind of social events that the group of younger people I hang around with organize. (I went back to grad school a lot later than those kids who just pushed on through. They grew up a facebook generation, I did not.) The other is keeping in touch with my relatives that all live 1000 miles away. If you're getting spammed with stupid crap, you have two very easy options: Unfriend them or block their status updates. It's really not hard. Nobody needs 400+ friends. Pick a close few, and viola, 95% of the crap is gone.
For browsing on my tiny netbook I went with Tab Style Tree for Firefox - it lets you put all the tabs on the left, freeing up a few more lines of vertical space. Killed the bookmark bar, merged the address bar, minimised icons...I got about 3-4 more lines of space out of the browser by default. Now, I can get more with F11, but I lose all the tabs.
That was my adaptation strategy. I do agree with the article that the lack of vertical space on laptops is becoming a serious problem.
Know of a place that does better? I'm in the market for one.
Nope. I'm assuming an ISP that is seeing its available bandwidth crippled by shittons of spam and worm activity. If you look at the numbers, spam is ridiculous compared to normal email volumes. Botnets are creating minor DDOS attacks just trying to spread.
I'm assuming botnets are a serious problem at the ISP level, and that they'd want to do something about it. This is from a technical standpoint, not from a sleazy-ass marketing standpoint. Does that viewpoint exist? Sure as hell does. Do the techs in the back room have a serious problem on their hands? Yes they do. The question is if it's serious enough to get attention from the tech side without drawing attention from the sleaze-bag side.
I still think there is a flaw in that logic. Botnets have to do two things:
1) Spread. This would take care of worms. Users aren't about to be scanning ports on hundreds of different machines over short time periods. Worms are. If you cut off machines trying to spread worms, you cut down on the problem significantly. This isn't behavior that most users engage in. It's very much worm-specific.
2) Do their job. If you're cutting off infected machines, there are less available to do their job. This means you can't necessarily spread the load out to other machines.
You're never totally going to get rid of botnets, but if you reduce their spread, and force them to really try to hide in normal traffic, we'll be in a much better place.
I don't trust ISPs much at all. But I think there's a drastic overreaction here about what's being suggested. Bot traffic doesn't look like normal traffic. If it did, we'd have orders of magnitude less spam in the world.
Are you kidding? False alarm?
Oh, Joe Luser is sending 10,000 emails an hour. It might be a false alarm!!!!!
Look - botnets aren't some sneaky, low network usage sort of thing. If they were, it wouldn't be an issue. By and large, botnets send out massive amounts of data. They are what produce the spam which floods the internet. They are what create the DDOS attacks on various sites. We're not talking about some user who suddenly has a spike in download activity. We're talking about saturating a connection for hours on end. We're talking about mass emails. We're talking about pings and network requests multiple times a second for hours.
Botnet activity isn't something that's hard to spot. If it's hard to spot, it's not an issue for the ISP. I think you're completely ignoring why botnets are a problem in the first place with your paranoid post of some alternate universe.
Nobody is going to have a 'false alarm'. Botnets are not in any way close to normal traffic. If they are, then the ISP doesn't have a problem with that amount of traffic, and the internet isn't choked with spam. And if you're somehow creating traffic close to what a botnet does, you're a problem as well.
Seriously, that seems to have gotten worse here, if such a thing is possible.
Yeah. The only AV that I've seen that's anywhere as bad as Norton is CA. I still can't get that off my GF's computer. I've spent 3 hours already. Norton Corporate is awesome. Nobody should have to deal with Norton Home. Ever. It's cruel and unusual punishment.
The Harmony remotes kick all sorts of ass. Got one for my dad a few years ago. Now he has one remote which does TV, Cable, Home Theater, VCR/DVD, etc. They take a bit of time to program, (CD with USB cable, look up device codes on the internet, etc.) but once set up, they are amazing. They even have troubleshooting built in. If something doesn't turn on/off, or your tuner/TV isn't on the right channel, the remote figures it out with a bit of user-input. I'd rather have hard buttons to press, but for technophobes like my dad, it's awesome.
You've got it.
I think the real reason may be able to be explained by a probability distribution, rather than a conspiracy. Phone companies have very, very few ways to credit your account. Definitely no automated credits. They have many, many automated ways to charge your account. Interest, late payment fees, over the limit for minutes/data/texts, out-of-network calling, roaming charges, etc.
Throw all the charges into a bucket with all the credits, and you're already very heavily weighted to charges when picking randomly. Take out everything that's not automated, and you're left with just about all charges. Not to say that they aren't sleazy as hell, but I think automated errors heavily favor charges due to the shear number of them.
It's all part of the downward trend here. Any ideas on a better site, with functional editors and useful comments?
Hey, maybe he lives in the middle of Montana, and drives to other states on the weekend for fun....
For the record, I-90 between Albany and Buffalo is one of the roads which I see in my nightmares. Too many long drives on that depressing stretch of nothing. Worst drive ever was from Ohio to Springfield, MA on 90. That drive never seemed to end. But yeah, parent had no idea what the hell he was talking about. 400-500 miles of driving, 6-8 hours depending on route and destination. That's not quite "relatively near"...
Do you want to know why? Dig up your state standards for education. Read through, and be amazed. Most of it is vague bullshit. Occasionally, we ask kids to memorize a bunch of facts, then spit them out on a bubble sheet. That's the federal mandate of NCLB. Education has been heading this way for decades now. We just formalized the decision that "knowledge = memorizing" in the last decade. Because memorizing is hard, we skim the surface of a bunch of stuff, and never teach kids how or why. Just what. It's really depressing. Here's a Math, Science, and Technology standard from New York:
MST-7-E: Realize ideas-Constructing components or models, arriving at a solution, and evaluating the result
I don't know about you, but I'm glad that we've set that standard for graduating seniors. It will take them far!
And that is tied directly to the economy.
Bad economy = less people upgrading computers = older OS versions on average. This is really a non-story.
Yet another example of how the editing of this website is solely focused on adviews, and nothing else. I'm looking for a new website, as are quite a few others. Any ideas?
Another user today posted what he claimed was his last post here, as he dumped /. forever due to shit like this. I'm pretty close as well. Anyone want to recommend another site that does science and tech, but has actual, non sleazeball, functional editors?
I've been feeling the same way for a long time now. However, I don't see that Reddit is any better. I skimmed the science section there and it's a mess of random cruft.
Where do we go to get useful science and technology news, edited appropriately, with a comment system that doesn't completely suck?
Slashdot would be fantastic if we could get some editors. However, the lack of any sort of useful work in that area is pretty close to driving me away even without an alternative. I blocked kdwason, which helped. But blocking absolute, mind-blowing suck doesn't help make the rest not suck.
French? Really? I grew up within spitting distance of Quebec, and the first thing I thought of when I heard 'Libre' was 'Lucha Libre'. I'm pretty sure that the Spanish-exposed US is a bigger portion than the French exposed. Although perhaps smaller than the 'Nacho Libre' exposed, although the brain injuries from that may make that a moot point.
Yeah, "wire tapping" laws need a 21st century re-do. A CCD soldered to a microprocessor soldered to a solid state drive, all soldered to a battery would be pretty damn hard to qualify under any sort of "wire tapping", for the most general definition of 'wire'. (Yes, I know that 'wire' in this context means "phone line or other communications line". Still...)
Sadly, they're pretty damn common. The job is self-selecting. You generally need to be a cocky, power hungry bastard to want to be a cop. There aren't a lot of white knights becoming cops. Plus, it's pretty well documented that people get excused from being cops for I.Q. test scores that are too high. If you want to be scarred for life, here are a blogger couple who document as many of these morons as they can. They're pretty hardcore libertarian/anti-government, but they do link to all primary sources in the way of local newspapers. Unknown News: Cops you won't see on COPS.
Three things:
First, the lifespans of CFL are based on on/off cycles, not time on. I haven't seen anyone who's in any way informed claim that CFL are good for places like bathrooms. In fact, other than a refrigerator, I can't think of many places where it would be worse to use a CFL. If you're putting a CLF into a bathroom, (or a refrigerator) you're using it in the worst way possible. Yes, it will suck for that. Those are places where we should be using incandescents. Use CFLs properly, and they last a damn long time.
Secondly, the quality of CFL varies a ton. I have one that does what you noted - a long period of dim, sickly light, then a brilliant dazzle. I have another that's nearly indistinguishable from an incandescent. The only difference is that it turns on at like (an equivalent) 90 watts instead of 100, and a quarter of the time I think to myself, "isn't that usually a little brighter...?" The rest of the time, I don't notice. After a couple minutes, it hits the full 100+ watt equivalent. It's bright and warm too. It's also been the primary bulb in my living room for 3+ years now. It gets turned on when it's getting dark, and stays on until I go to bed. That's how you use a CFL. And in that case, it doesn't matter that it's a tiny bit dim when it first comes on. If you need instant, 100% intensity light, you should be using an incandescent in that application.
Lastly, would you all stop panicking about mercury? It's fucking obnoxious. The WHO sets a limit for mercury exposure at 5x10^-4 grams per day. A CFL has about 4-5 grams of mercury in it. Yes, if you punch a hole in a CFL and inhale all the mercury out of it, it will be bad. But when you break one, the mercury vaporizes. What's the volume of the room you break it in, compared to the volume of the CFL? If you're in a room that's substantially larger than the inside of the CFL, (hint: you are!) the mercury quickly disperses in it. Ventilate, and you'll be fine. In fact, even if you don't, you should be fine, unless you break a bulb every couple of weeks inside. And each bulb has on the same order of magnitude of mercury that each adult has in their mouth in the way of fillings.
Use a quality CFL properly, and you're saving money, saving energy, and it's pretty much indistinguishable from an incandescent. Like anything, go cheap and use it improperly, and it doesn't do a good job. I agree with you about LED lighting - a few more years, and I think it will start to be competitive. Just leave off the mercury poisoning crap please. Unless you're huffing CFLs, they're perfectly safe.
In this case? Into light. I mean, if you want a lightbulb, you should just buy one...
Frustrating, isn't it? My favorite are just straight IP addresses which require permission to run scripts. With all the botnets in the world using home computers, I'm not even going to bother to look up who it belongs to. That's just sketchy as all hell.
If you're a legitimate website, there's no reason you need to have 5-10 other domains running scripts on your page, including just random IP addresses.
For those of us who use things like NoScript, the price can be that we don't get there. Ever.
I know that when I go to a site that can't work unless I allow a half dozen or more other sites to run scripts, I sometimes decide that it's not worth my time. When I click a link that then has to contact several domains, (sometimes ones I have specifically blocked) I might stop right there and close the tab.
The web isn't just headed towards redirect hell - it's turning into a damn sketchy web of tentacles working their way into every page. When I find ones that I'm not comfortable having around, I don't go back.
I'm not sure I like what the web has become. Thanks to NoScript, I at least know what it's become.